Professional Radio Broadcast Software

A small keypress for an engineer, a giant leap for broadcasting!

November 1, 2017

Stockholm November 1st 2017:Yesterday afternoon we tapped on the keyboard and pushed the source code of the IRIS Codec Call Monitor (CCM) out on Github. This is the end of step one – the internal work – and the real start of the Open Source project. All of the CCM is now Open Source and available for free download from Github. As a public service company, it feels right for us in Sveriges Radio to contribute to the world of open source software and make our in-house system available for other radio stations, as well as everyone else that is interested in this management platform for ACIP-compatible audio contribution networks.

An invitation to cooperation

CCM is licensed using the BSD 3-clause license, a license approved by the Open Source Initiative. This license means that you can freely download and use the software. If you make changes, you are invited but not obliged to contribute back to the project. We hope you do, so we can make improvements, bug fixes and write documentation together.

We are new to this, so please bear with us as we learn how to work together in an open source project. We are working to create mailing lists and the needed infrastructure for cooperation in the project. We have focused on getting the source code published, so these platforms have been on the back-burner until now. Github has an issue tracker and other tools we can use until we have the rest of the tools ready.

The plan ahead: Making release 2.0

One thing that we are working on now that the code is available is how to integrate our internal development with the open source platform. We want our systems to run the same source code, we want our developers to work in the open on Github together with you. This is our focus right now.

The way we see it, this first release is a giant leap forward, but not the final step. We still have our internal code repository and you will not see all the changes made. If we find bugs, we will make changes to both repositories, our internal and the one on GitHub. The challenge now is to merge these processes into one, so that we will leave our internal code repository and focus all our work on Github. This means that we will have to adapt our deployment routines, modify configuration code in the software and implement new test systems. In order to get the code out on the Internet, we had to make the decision to do this as a second step. We will keep you posted on the progress. It’s a story by itself, how to take internal code – and development – and move it all out in the view of the public.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Today, we are celebrating and are very proud of our accomplishment so far. We are expecting you to bring us down to firm ground, to tell us where to go next and how you want us to interact with you. The future of the IRIS CCM is now shared between us and all future users out there. We are excitedly awaiting the first signs of feedback. Fork the code on GitHub, file an issue, fix some typos, add new functions and generate a pull request. We are waiting by our keyboards.